让旅游研究回归唯物主义

旅游的唯物主义研究方法在地理学范围内乃至社会科学领域面临挑战。直到20世纪80年代，旅游研究领域仍为经济学视角所主导，自90年代初起，旅游研究受到了文化转向的深刻影响，旅游活动的研究从讨论目的地逐步发展为研究旅游者本身。旅游现象的经济学视角逐渐让位于文化视角，从宏观社会角度转入微观社会学分析。通过研究旅游者行为、话语和想象，有助于更好地理解旅游研究者长期忽视的元素，把旅游研究和其他问题区分开来，并趋于掩盖旅游发展带来或激化的社会不平等和统治关系等问题。在旅游的地理学研究回归到唯物主义方法的背景下，更充分地理解旅游业相关社会冲突，特别是为争夺旅游地空间占有权的冲突。文章以一系列旅游空间问题为出发点，以墨西哥的实证研究为基础，关注旅游发展带来的地方冲突，重点围绕土地所有权问题展开。马克思主义哲学家列斐伏尔的理论成果为创立空间政治经济学奠定了基础，特别关注空间的旅游开发中容易引发或者激化的社会矛盾。回归历史唯物主义似乎是一种鼓励旅游批判性评估的方法，有助于回避70年代盛行的基于结构主义和马克思主义视角的研究弊端，并聚焦于目的地社会的旅游“影响”问题，表明旅游研究对更加全面理解当代资本主义社会的贡献。

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This article analyses the challenges of the materialist approach to tourism within geography and, more broadly, within the field of social sciences. Initially, these challenges will be examined in the light of the theoretical and epistemological changes that tourism research has undergone over the past twenty years. While the economic perspective dominated this sector of research up until the 1980s, tourism studies have since the early 1990s been predominantly influenced by the cultural turn. In this context, the study of tourism activities has progressively evolved from looking at host communities to studying the tourists themselves. The economic aspects have given way to the cultural aspects of the phenomenon, while also abandoning the macro-social approach in favor of micro-sociological analysis. If this theoretical shift has allowed us to gain a better understanding of elements which have up to now been neglected by the analysis, in particular through the study of tourists’ practices, discourses and imaginaries, such an evolution has also helped to distance tourism research from other major problems, and tends to eclipse, for example, the social inequalities and relations of domination that tourism contributes to generate, or exacerbate. Based on this observation, the article then presents our research aims which we envisage will bring the geographical study of tourism back into the context of a materialist approach. Such an approach is based, for example, on a better understanding of the conflicts affecting tourism-linked societies and on the analysis of local struggles for the appropriation of space in tourist areas. To accomplish this, our ideas are based on empirical research carried out in Mexico looking at local conflicts caused by the growth of tourism, notably in relation to land-ownership issues, but also on a number of more theoretical questions about the spatial dimension of tourism. The approach we have developed is mainly based on the theoretical legacy of the Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre. His work has inspired a political economy of space which pays special attention to the social contradictions that the tourist valorization of space helps to generate or exacerbate. The return to historical materialism is then seen as a way of encouraging the critical appraisal of tourism, while at the same time avoiding the dangers of those structuralist and Marxist approaches developed in the 1970s and concentrating on the question of the "impact" of the phenomenon on host societies. In such a way, it is also possible to demonstrate the contribution of tourism studies to a more global understanding of contemporary capitalist societies